A Divining Rod for Undiscovered Dhammas: The Predictive Power of Hemisphere Lateralization

But, Shannon, isn’t Hemisphere Lateralization just a handy reframe for neuroscience-junkies?

I’m glad you asked. :)

We’ve already considered HemLat as a powerful explanatory model. But if that were all it offered it might sit—more or less comfortably—alongside other dhammic explanations.

For example, I once told a teacher on retreat that I was nauseous and trembling after several weeks of one meal a day. They responded: “This is khamma. You were gluttonous in a past life.”

I’ve also heard: “Jhānas are ways of accessing the Kāmadhātu heavens.”

These explanations are “post-hoc”. They explain or interpret something we’ve _already_ experienced.

HemLat also provides post-hoc explanations. But it does more than that. What excites me is its generative potential—the possibility of discovering new modalities, new practices—or the revitalization of abandoned ones.

As a reminder, I’m working with the hypothesis that awakening is a shift toward right-hemisphere ways of being. Again, what’s exciting is that this view can emancipate us—as much as we care to be emancipated—by giving us permission to explore outside the confines of any single tradition. We can look across traditions and disciplines for right-hemisphere-recruiting modalities (or left-hemisphere-inhibiting ones) whether or not they exist in our home practice.

Music and dance, for example, are strongly right-hemisphere-recruiting. No surprise, cultures across time have used them in spiritual traditions. One of my dear friends, a Theravādān type, uses music to access jhānas. But don’t tell their teacher.

I understand why Gotama may have restricted his followers from music and dance; they are powerful and slippery medicine. But so it is with any dhamma—pick the snake up by the wrong end and you’re in trouble.

Gotama enjoined his mendicants to spend time in the forest—not just because it was quiet for meditation, or to guard them from village temptations—he may have recognized the benefits of strong right-hemisphere recruitment. If mendicants awakened more readily in the past (I’m skeptical), it could be that their life in nature did a big chunk of the work. They were already more in their right hemisphere than we are today, surrounded by man-made, low-complexity, straight-lined environments.

Okay, Shannon, maybe. But we already know about song and dance and forest bathing. What’s this “generative, predictive” business you’re on about?

Scrolling a (rather long) list of right-hemisphere-recruiting modalities we find: the left side of the body is controlled by the right hemisphere; the right hemisphere is more sensitive to overall shape than fine detail; it prefers unique things over categories; it leans analog over digital; and it has greater proprioceptive awareness than the left hemisphere.

Given this list, I can propose a right-hemisphere recruiting modality: blind-contour drawing with the left hand.

• It engages the left side of the body,
• considers the overall shape of an object, 
• explores the qualities of the individual object that I am sitting in front of,
• and by not looking at what I’m doing, engages the right hemisphere’s proprioceptive sensitivity.

We could try blind-contour drawing as a bhāvanā, as a cultivation, and reflect: what are the effects?

Assuming you don’t have an fMRI handy, we’d look for familiar signs of right-hemisphere recruitment: openness, lightness, letting go, maybe a little levity. Subjective, sure, but readers of this essay are sufficiently calibrated to know when they are moving towards contraction and when they are moving towards release.

Hemisphere Lateralization does not merely re-map what we already know. Instead of peering through the keyhole of a single tradition, HemLat opens the door—we step out into the landscape of human experience. Guided by right-hemisphere recruitment—perhaps alongside a teacher, perhaps within a tradition, why not?—we select and compose practices suited to this idiosyncratically conditioned being. We are not giving up Sīla, Samādhi, and Paññā—we are finding paths to them that are uniquely our own.

Your Thoughts?